True - for servers - put it in a corner and away it trundles for years.
Not so for desktops (in my experience).
I am pleased to say that Puppy is very stable and if you just use it for simple tasks, it is a great workhorse (Puppys are too frisky to work - they play hard and work hard at play) but some of us . . .

. . . well a lot of us are happily fiddling and loading and trying and experirimenting . . .

so sometimes programs sieze up, freeze or refuse to respond - hence the need to close them and the use of the bomb. Much quicker than rebooting.

The good news is Linux is getting ever better on the desktop. It evolves at an astonishing rate . . .

Well that is one explanation - also the bomb is an anarchist symbol (not used by anarchists) and the skull and crossbones is a symbol of the Knights Templers - just thought I would throw that in as a red herring - (yum!)

After playing around with about 8 different distro's - I was quite surprised to find my computer -

[Athlon XP 1.6 GHz
512 RAM
64 MB Video
80MB HD]

- crashing and hanging quite a lot. I'm a longtime heavy Win XP Pro user, and there are stretches when I have gone for *months* without XP crashing or even freezing. I'm slowly flirting with Linux with a view to migrate there eventually, but, I'm not sure Linux is quite there yet as a desktop solution for Joe Average. For what it's worth, Win XP is pretty good as a desktop tool for my needs.

I like XP and WIn 98SE and Ubuntu and Mac OS - what is it Tiger now?
(I am using XP on a borrowed machine - earlier I was using Puppy here too)

Here is my report on the current situation (constantly updateable as it is a wiki)

http://peace.wikicities.com/wiki/HolyGeek_Linux_Report

That is Puppy on the top . . .

I am very pleased that we (hopefully) will soon be able to develop Puppy in Puppy (with a dotpup or pupget and a C compiler)

Most of the time I (as a seasoned Windows user) am in Puppy - through choice and preference. I still recognise the strengths and weaknesses of many approaches. Not everyone likes, needs or will use Puppy. More and more people do. They love it..

But what is 'reliability'. If your computer crashes, and you make a successful recovery - with no data loss - then you might consider that 'reliable'. If you lose the data after a crash, then the OS is 'unreliable'. In this case, when it crashes, Windows tends to be unreliable. I haven't used Linux for long enough to compare its reliability vs Windows XP. From my limited experience, they seem about equal.

Personally, I consider Linux to be more reliable.
Why? When a program crashes, it doesn't take the OS down with it.
With Windows XP, the OS tends to go down with the program. Or at least in my experience.

Unrelability is usually application related and not actually "Linux", rather applications written or compiled to run in the Linux environment.

Yes you are right (if a little pedantic

This is also the sort of talk that belittles the experience of real users who do not differentiate. Many distros include these non-working programs out of what? Hope that they will work with a following wind?

tee hee.

Puppy works well and I prefer to use it.
I was looking at DSL 1.3 which now has Ganeesha (elephants) as its default backdrop.
It has some nice features including comprehensive downloads. It uses the knoppix hardware recognition. After about an hour (I went to their built in IRC channel) I lost interest. Mostly because I know it does not have the stability I require and rely on.

I know and understand what you are saying Bruce but to say Linux is stable but some programs are not . . .
is like saying Windows is good unless you use it (which is all too often the case)

However I also have Ubuntu and that works. It is easy to install and the programs and whole experience is one of working software and a model that will develop.

Linux has been bewildering to me. Puppy is the first distro that realistically has allowed me to immerse myself in Linux.

Linux is fun. So is Puppy. Windows is a continually discontinued distro. You might say I have been Tuxed. I blame it on penguins like you Bruce.

The reason non-working software is often included is because it has potential. So Linux is very much (even now) a development and developing environment. It takes a while to understand that. When you get involved you become geekified.

What fun.

PS.
Thanks for all your recent posts which are very good and I hope some kind penguin will move relevant ones to the wiki._________________Puppy WIKI

Lobster your crazy LOL But I hear you dsl has a lot of glitches always has
and yes they are waiting for the tradewinds
But with puppy you got a good support group to back your move
and that is why puppy's come in litters!!!

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